Elon Musk announced early Monday that he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in the United States next year, a pledge that would amount to roughly $10.5 billion in stock at current prices.
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. “This will be the first of many.”
The post was viewed nearly 6 million times within hours, according to the New York Post. It landed a day after Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, said it would commit 5 per cent of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund. Musk responded to Anthropic’s Sunday announcement by saying, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public,” adding in a follow-up reply: “This is what I will be doing.”
The numbers involved are staggering. Roughly 72 to 73 million Americans are under the age of 18, according to U.S. census data. SpaceX shares closed at $146.03 on Friday, which puts the total value of the giveaway at around $10.5 billion. Musk can afford it: a regulatory filing shows he held about 6.42 billion SpaceX shares as of June 30 — roughly a 48.4 per cent stake in the company — and his fortune has been valued at more than $900 billion, making him the world’s richest person.
What Musk did not explain is how any of this would actually work. There were no details on eligibility, timing, tax treatment, or how shares would be distributed to tens of millions of children. One plausible route already exists: the Trump Accounts program, under which the U.S. Treasury is automatically enrolling tens of millions of under-18s in investment accounts. New Treasury rules issued last month allow wealthy donors to contribute stock to those accounts while avoiding capital-gains taxes. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and her husband pledged earlier this year to donate one share to each of roughly two million children participating in the program, and billionaire Michael Dell and his wife Susan pledged $6.25 billion to it as well.
SpaceX went public in June in what was described as the largest initial public offering in history, raising $85.7 billion and briefly making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The aerospace company builds reusable rockets and operates the Starlink satellite internet network. Anthropic, its rival in the parallel race over artificial intelligence, is meanwhile preparing an IPO of its own and said its new public benefit fund could support nonprofit donations, direct payments to specific populations, and research into AI’s impact on the labour market.
The back-and-forth points to something larger than one man’s generosity. The AI boom has minted staggering personal fortunes, and it is also generating public unease about who benefits. Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-first lab and set up its pledge as a formal fund. Musk’s answer is characteristic of him: skip the institution, hand the shares directly to the public, and let the market do the rest. Earlier this month, 400 scientists signed a letter demanding powerful AI be cut off from the internet — a reminder that the industry’s enormous wealth is arriving alongside enormous anxiety about its consequences.
There is reason to hold the applause. Musk has a long record of headline-grabbing pledges that arrive with more fanfare than follow-through, and distributing tens of millions of shares to minors is a legal and logistical thicket — even for the richest man in history. But if he follows through, and his recent reconciliation with the Trump administration gives him a ready-made distribution pipeline through Trump Accounts, it would be one of the largest direct transfers of corporate equity to the public ever attempted — and a signal that the AI era’s wealth is starting to flow, however messily, downward.
